Author Shane Neilson
Reading from New Brunswick
Heralding a new regionalism, New Brunswick interrogates the popular representations of Shane Neilson’s home province. Structured as a group of serial long poems, this fifth book by the winner of the 2017 Walrus Poetry Prize recasts the political, economic, and social histories of settler New Brunswick, particularly as they relate to the sacrifices of his parents. As forests are reborn and fields are healed by rest, Neilson insists that though “we want catastrophes of fire,” out of the ashes of charred dreams and old myths arise avenues for reconciliation through vulnerability and affect.
Author Danny Jacobs
Reading from Sourcebooks for Our Drawings
Sourcebooks for Our Drawings is a book steeped in place: the rural idyll of a Southeastern New Brunswick farmhouse, the author's childhood suburbia, and the commercial sprawl of contemporary Atlantic Canada. Each piece provides a snapshot of New Brunswick in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a place at once unique and startlingly not-so in our globalized word. Part fragmentary memoir, part genre hybrid, and entirely a compilation of familial lore, Jacobs’s new book—his first in prose—is a singular and idiosyncratic portrait of New Brunswick, an alternate history and an antidote to dry regionalism. A formally innovative and very personal work, Sourcebooks for Our Drawings nevertheless addresses universal concerns about our fraught relationships with nostalgia and memory.
Author Kirby
Reading from This is Where I Get Off
Think of a heart-racing first date at a 5-star restaurant, the back door of which opens into a steamy alley, loaded with Allen Ginsberg’s “saintly motorcyclists” and Kirby’s “bevy of bears,” and this is the astonishing new poetry collection, THIS IS WHERE I GET OFF, double meaning intended and perfectly executed throughout. Other thrilling collisions occur throughout the book: fear and loneliness are assailed by cat-creamy satisfaction and hot thrills; the language itself is raw and cooked; love is prevailed upon like justice, to be not strained but mad about...a Whitmanic cry of passion and pain that treats both the quotidian and the extraordinary with excitement as if also developing a poetics and philosophy. That life is a series of exquisitely beautiful moments, sewn together by our dear selves. To be gay and sexual, desired and desiring: it is inscribed here, and why not, as the Passion and here I say to the author, love is the very wonder of you.
